Will BE lock Veeam files if it is backing up data and then Veeam tries to run a backup at the same time?

[siravarice]

I have a large amount of data to backup (~16TB) and it's going to run for around 40-45 hours. This backup is set to backup all the Veeam backup data from the daily backups.

However, if the BE job starts in the morning and is still running in the evening, will it lock the files so that Veeam then cannot write there? 

[CraigV]

Hi,

Probably yes...best bet is to use 1 vendor to do all the backups.

Veeam 7 for instance can backup to tape...

Thanks!

[siravarice]

Veeam 8* :)

But ok thanks for letting me know. Trying to figure out how to run this job without the two clashing. Currently I believe my best bet is for the daily backups to be stopped over the weekend.

[CraigV]

...you'd have to look at disabling the BE services which can be scripted. Just schedule this within Windows.

If you can restart the Veeam services via Powershell (or something like that), then it would reinitialise the lock on the library.

Thanks!

[Colin_Weaver · Accepted solution]

For hopefully obvious reasons we do not test backing up Veeam data with Backup Exec - we also do not test any affects of systems having both Veeam and Symantec VSS requests happening on the same systems or what might get locked by backup activity. As such you might get unpredictable results and really all we can say officially is not tested, feel free to perform your own analysis into the best way to use both products.

Note: Any best practice would use one product for your backup operations (Keep things simple)

Just to outline a potential scenario with using the two products

You backup using Veeam to disk, you then backup the Veeam data to tape with Backup Exec - in order to get back a complete VM from tape (that is no longer available directly to Veeam on disk) you would have to restore back from tape to disk, perform what ever re-index or recatalog that Veeam needs and then restore with Veeam

If you had backed the VM up directly with Backup Exec to disk and then duplicated this to tape, also with Backup Exec, then you would be able to restore the whole VM directly from the tape back into the VMware environment and not have the multiple stage restore concept.